Corporate Fail #1: After all the promotion for NBC’s new Peacock streaming service, I wanted to check it out. I’m not that interested in its library of shows, but thought I might like an original British series called “The Capture.” Unfortunately, NBC hasn’t made a deal with Amazon to have a Peacock app on the Firestick, which we use to access Netflix, Prime Video, and other streaming services (HBO Max is similarly unavailable via that device). So, I tried getting it to our other TV via Chromecast. Unfortunately, although the Peacock app has a Chromecast logo on it, and despite NBC’s claim that the service and the hardware are compatible, all I got was a black screen, not the content I was hoping to view. Checking online, I found others who have been unable to cast the Peacock app to their TVs. Don’t they test these things before releasing them and making public pronouncements of their availability?
Updated 7/24/2020 at 2:01pm…Sue Morris provided me with a link to a YouTube video that explains a workaround allowing users to install Peacock (and HBO Max) on the Amazon Firestick. It’s a little bumpy to install, but it works.
Corporate Fail #2: I just finished a book from a major publishing house (Hachette) that was full of typos. This was not an unedited galley, but the finished product that I paid for from a reputable book distributor. Yet, it was rare to go ten pages without seeing the kinds of mistakes that should have been caught by whoever served as this project’s editor — extraneous characters in the middle of words, incorrect punctuation, etc. I won’t tell you the name of the book because it’s not the author’s fault (I’d bet the errors were not in the final draft that was submitted). Moreover, I really enjoyed what I read, but I was shocked at the sloppiness displayed. As a writer myself, I try to be very conscious of catching misspellings and other mistakes in my work. But before I publish it on this site, I still run it by both my wife and daughter, both of whom have keen eyes for those sorts of things (hey, Hachette, need a scrupulous copy editor?). If I can do it on a blog I maintain merely as a hobby, a big publishing company should be able to do it for every book it publishes.
Corporate Fail #3: When I check Twitter, I usually don’t pay attention to the suggestions of Who To Follow, but one of them caught my eye this week. It was America Weekend, the syndicated radio show I did for a couple of years until we pulled the plug because we couldn’t get enough advertisers. I clicked on the logo to see if there were any new tweets, but nothing’s been posted since 2014. Makes me wonder why the account still exists at all, or why Twitter doesn’t purge those that are old and unused.
Speaking of Twitter, when I heard of last week’s hack — in which some major celebrities’ accounts were hijacked by someone promising to double the money of anyone who would send them a thousand dollars — I had to laugh at all the people who fell for it. That’s pure greed and stupidity at play, and all the “victims” got exactly what they deserved. That’s not to say the perpetrators shouldn’t be punished, but I feel no sympathy for anyone who was ripped off.
Hey, maybe I can get them to pay upfront for commercials on the new version of America Weekend I have no intention of doing, with a guarantee of no typos and compatibility with all streaming devices!